


The Two-Part Job

by shakespeareaddict



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, More tags to follow, Negative Space Wedgies, Older Men Having Adventures, requires little to no knowledge of TOS canon, rewrite of st:xi, still being written so be patient please
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-12
Updated: 2014-01-12
Packaged: 2018-01-07 16:21:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1121968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shakespeareaddict/pseuds/shakespeareaddict
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Doctor Leonard McCoy, who had hoped to escape to a remote Star Base after graduation next month, instead finds himself thrust into the thick of 'Fleet operations when a series of anomalies occur around Vulcan.</p><p>Meanwhile, Admiral Leonard McCoy tries to keep himself and his husbands alive after they fall out of their timeline and into the hands of a certifiable psychopath with technology far ahead of the rest of this galaxy's....</p><p>A rewrite of the 2009 movie, featuring McCoy Prime and Kirk Prime as well as the usual suspects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Two-Part Job

**Author's Note:**

> Somewhere on this site is a wonderful fic called "Start Infinity Again" that's a Spirky rewrite of the 2009 movie starring Shatner's Kirk and Nimoy's Spock (who were both on the Jellyfish during the whole time-travel debacle), and it was sort of the inspiration for this, except I said "Triumvirate! Spones! Spirk! McKirk!" This will probably end up as a much heavier rewrite (ie more changes) and it focuses on both the AOS and TOS characters. Oh, and also it's the first of what I hope to make into a trilogy (God help me....).
> 
> So, yeah. Not a lot to say about this so far. I'll try to address major things in the notes, so if anyone has questions at any time, lemme know.
> 
> Also, I know the title sucks. I'll try to find a better one.
> 
> Edit: Marginally better title now, so yay!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man with a good set of lungs and more than twenty years’ experience of using them to full effect in a family of ten, no matter the circumstances, must always end every crisis as the top dog.

“Get these people out, now!”

Maybe that’s why he ended up shouting at the top of his opera-belter-worthy voice to the thirty-some odd medics and crewmen around him, and even though he was pretty sure at least half of them outrank him, they did exactly what he said.

Len braced himself and his patient—some redshirt with a broken leg—against the nearest bulkhead as another explosion rocked the ship. They somehow stayed upright, but others weren’t as lucky—he saw more than a few nasty spills. The jutting support strut nearby trembled violently, as if threatening to give way.

This wasn’t how the story started, of course. This was just the middle of the action.

No, it all started with the shittiest morning Len had had in years. 

* * *

 Len had never quite mastered the art of having a non-shitty Thursday. He didn’t know why, but for some reason, every Thursday just sucked with the power of a thousand vacuums on a dirty carpet. Broken coffee machines, unexpected illnesses that left him with incompetent interns instead of nurses, divorce papers; all were expected on Thursdays. Usually, though, once the shit had passed, Friday was a better day. At the very least, it was no worse than any other day of the week.

Sometimes, however…sometimes Fridays were just as bad as Thursdays.

Take this Friday, for example.

Len woke up with a splitting headache that had nothing to do with a hangover. His skin felt too tight for his face, his mouth was all cottony, there was still mucus dripping out of his nose like snow dripping off branches in an early spring thaw, and he had a terrible tension headache. His back was all twisted even though he was a few months shy of thirty-one and he hadn’t slept on the floor, and his head was too small for his brain. He was in his roommate’s bed.

And his head really, really fucking hurt.

Laying there all pathetic on Jim’s rumpled sheets (may they have been recently washed, please) wasn’t going to help anything, really, so he dragged his sorry ass out of bed and into the bathroom before the pain convinced him to stop. Once there, he managed to splash some water onto his face, which at least made him feel more awake but did nothing for his headache. He fumbled for the medkit he kept in the medicine cabinet and the preset hypo he kept for Jim’s own killer migraines, practically sighing with ecstasy when blessed relief surged from the needle in his neck and settled in his skull. There. Now, at least, he could focus without worrying about his head splitting in two. Not that his head would literally split in two; it was medically impossible, as he well knew, he had a medical degree--

Len turned the tap on full blast and ducked his head straight into the freezing water. No. He wasn’t going to think about that, at all. Stop the presses; he’d done enough of that yesterday. That horse had already been beaten to a posthumous pulp.

He reemerged from the bog and pulled on jeans and his Ole' Miss sweater to guard against the unseasonable chill. San Francisco was pleasant for all of three weeks out of the year. The other forty-nine were varying levels of damp and cold. He wanted nothing more than to go home and get out of the whole damn state, but where would he go? Back home? No. So the damp and the depressing scenery and stupid, stupid professors with shitty haircuts were all part of his life now, and they weren’t going away.

At least he didn’t have classes today. His one Friday lecture had been cancelled for the foreseeable future, leaving him mostly free.

But he did, through some fluke of scheduling he would resent for all time, have a shift at the hospital, in only an hour according to the clock, and it took half an hour or so to just get to the damn place. Clearly he’d need to rush through morning preparations; a shower was out of the question (though at least he didn’t entirely reek of last night’s debacle). Caffeine and some of the cafeteria slop was a necessity, and one he’d have to hurry to get.

Hurry he did, to the nearest dining hall, through some abominable excuse for an omelet and something resembling coffee in the academic sense alone, onto the bus and through the double doors of the hospital, right up into the locker rooms where he dashed into his scrubs and punched in with no time whatsoever to spare.

He spent his shift, from eight to four with no lunch break, on autopilot. Not that he wasn’t attentive to each patient that he saw, but he certainly wasn’t thinking between patients. He shut down everything that didn’t have to do with his job and wore himself down with unfeeling perfection, a strategy that had served him well before Starfleet, other than the fact that it’d probably cost him his marriage. There was no danger of that here, he thought ironically. There were nebulous plans to simply collapse once he got back to his room, and with no significant other to protest it (as he’d been painfully reminded of last night), they were likely to succeed.

They would have succeeded if, on the ride back to campus, he hadn’t been jerked out of his doze by the far-too-cheery sound of his Academy comm receiving a message.

If it was Jim, he was going to kill him.

But it wasn’t anyone he could afford to bump off—it was an order to the entire class of 2258 to report in their uniforms to Lecture Hall 1C in the Neuroscience Building for a formal assembly at 1645.

Leonard groaned and thumped his head against the window. 

* * *

A few dozen parsecs away and several hours earlier, a similar—but different, and much, much older—Doctor McCoy came into the universe, got one good look out the window of the small craft he flew in, and swore mightily.

As difficult as the other McCoy’s day had been, the elder’s had been, arguably, worse.


End file.
